Field of the Invention
The invention is generally related to the area of optical communications. In particular, the present invention is related to.
The Background of Related Art
The alignment procedure is an important step in the process chain of assembling micro-optical components. It has a direct impact on the device performance of a micro-optical system, the necessary assembly time and the manufacturing costs. For that reason, only alignment procedures that are adapted to the special requirements of each assembly task will be able to save costs and attain the best optical system performance.
Conventionally, optical components in a free space device are held by tweezers or vacuum tweezers manually or with stage extension arms. With the sizes of optical components becoming smaller and smaller, these holding tools could handle them properly. The sizes of some optical components go down to the order of millimeters (e.g., 2.5×2.5 mm), even sub-millimeters, the tips of the tweezers or the mouths of the vacuum tweezers are often larger than the cross sections of the optical components.
Even more, many optical surfaces cannot be touched to avoid possible damage or scratch there to as well as for the purpose of optical alignment, the holding area of an optical component is further constrained. Therefore, a new methodology of holding optical components is required. That holding tools must neither block the optical light path nor damage/scratch the optical surfaces.